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Let's talk about bluntness in communication. Suppose there were two different farms with two different farmers running them. And the same worker goes to get a job at each farm. On the first farm, the worker shows up and without even looking up from what he's doing, the farmer says in a gruff way, "You're the bean picker. That's your field." And he says, "Come back and let me know once it's weeded." And that's that. The second farm, the farmer stops what he's doing. He looks with this overflowing concern at the new guy. He puts his arm around him. He says, "You're going to be great. You're I'm going to make you the executive executive director of Legumes. You're going to be reporting directly to me. I'm so glad you're here. When you're ready to get started, that's your beam patch over there." and so on and so forth, right? So, it turns out that almost everyone will prefer the second farmer. But is that a good thing? It turns out that softness, the value of softness of speech is limited to the lack of value in the person that needs to hear it. The value of softness of speech is limited to the lack of value in the person that hears it, that needs to hear it. That in and of itself is super offensive, isn't it? Now, we live in a world that, for lack of a better word, is highly feminized. It used to be that there was a masculine appreciation for getting information given to you straight. But now we have not only allowed this dictation of how we say things and what we can say, but it's become mainstream. Now, I I had a conversation with a friend of mine not too long ago, and he happens to have a lot of females in his family. He's a husband and a father. I actually know several people in that boat, but this particular person, he said, "You know, you can't say things the same way to women as you can to men." And I said, "That thought has never crossed my mind in my entire life." And I laughed because it explained an awful lot of situations. Now, I bring that up not because I think this is a men women situation. I don't actually, but I I'm bringing it up from the gender perspective, uh, from an archetypal approach, talking about something that's masculine or feminine archetypally, not necessarily strictly by gender, although there is huge overlap. That's not the point of this. We have gotten to the point as a society where we want everything to be sugarcoated and there are immense terrible consequences for this. Let's go back to the example of the of the family, the father who says, "I can't say the same things to women that I would say to to men or in the same way." That doesn't sound like it's overtly bad. But let me explain why it is. What that means is in the set of all things that you could say, there are things that can't be said. In the set of all things, all ways of saying it, there are things that you can't do. Invariably, what that means is that there is information that you cannot convey. And for some reason, people don't make that connection. And it's it's really bad. It's really bad. What it means is as long as we're imposing limits on communication on what can be said and how, what we're doing is guaranteeing the person we're communicating to will not have the same picture we do. Guaranteed. It has to be that way because you're taking tools off the table and you're saying, "Well, I can't say this. I can't say that. I can't say it in this way. I can't say it in that way." And if that were the sum total of the downsides, it would be enough. But it actually is worse than that. So let's go back to the bean picking example. So Mr. Fluff everyone up. That farmer who likes to sugarcoat everything. You say like, "Well, what's the harm? What's the harm in in that bean picker feeling like he's something more than that?" Well, because he's not. He's not. He's a bean picker. He needs to go weed the bean field. You can't make something less seem like something more without harming the people you do that to. That bean picker will probably never figure it out. But what that farmer has done has been to make it more difficult for him to advance in life. and he's robbed his employee of confidence that would be rightly his if he did a good job. What do you mean? Think about the kinds of compliments that guy's going to get constantly. Because that Mr. Fluff it up farmer, he's going to be of this mindset of, "Oh, I have to compliment this guy five times for every one criticism I give him." Do you know how that works in practice? It's not that you hold back the criticism until you naturally give five true compliments. You will notice things that you have to correct or that you want to correct. And you will generate five compliments before you say the thing. And anyone with half a brain cell knows what you're doing. And even if they can't think about it, they can sense how insincere you are. It's a form of lying. To compliment someone for something that you don't value is a form of lying. Even if the thing you're complimenting them for is true. Like like, "Oh, your shirt is so red. Who cares? Do you care?" Now, maybe you're the connoisseur of red and it is something that you care deeply about. Okay, great. But if you just say something that you don't actually you compliment something somebody for something that you don't actually care about, that's a lie. That's a lie. You're pretending to care, right? And that has enormous consequences. The thing is is that employee will never be able to trust the farmer ever. Ever. And maybe the farmer makes the employee feel good. Okay? But again, that's only going to be true in as much as that employee is either dumb or dishonest. Now, there are plenty of both in this world and unfortunately the trait is often shared. Those traits, that pair of traits is often shared, but it doesn't work. It doesn't hold up to the demands of life. And people in that boat are going to get overwhelmed very quickly once they take a half a step out of the abundance that we live in today. And it's coming. It's already here for a lot of people. So let's flip that around. So remember Mr. Gruff Farmer? We have Mr. Fluff Farmer and Mr. Gruff Farmer. If the gruff farmer tells his employee, "Hey, you did a good job on this, how do you think that employee is going to feel?" Now, fluff farmer can say the same thing in the same way and it will be meaningless. You see how this works? If everything is valuable, then nothing is valuable. You can't escape that. So we need to get to a place as individuals where what we care about is the information, not the delivery mechanism. And what we care about is the truth, not how we feel, not how we feel right now. Where we want to be good people and not just feel good as who we are right now. Now this has significance that's maybe not obvious. It goes beyond the applications at the individual level. What about in your family? If you're a father, you may have never thought about it before, but one of your duties in life is to prepare those in your household to be more open to information, no matter in what form it comes. So, this is true of your relationship with your wife and your relationship with your kids. You ought to be training these people to be more able to dispassionately consider information independent of the vehicle in which it's delivered. Now, there are ways that you can do this better and worse. If you go around walking on eggshells all the time in your own house and there are things that you have to block that you don't want to say or you're you're constantly sweating about how you say things or people in your house including your wife is constantly coming after you are constantly coming after you like the tone police. I don't like your tone in your own house. No one should ever tell you that. And it's not just because it's a form of disrespect. Anyone in your house, if you're doing your job, should know because they've been taught that saying, "I don't like your tone," is an admission that you have no valid counterargument to the point that was just made. With your kids, you're trying to prep them so that no one else has to do this work. It's like it's like shaping a piece of rock into a statue. There are things as a parent that you're meant to do before your kids leave the house so that no one else has to deal with them in the ways that a parent does. You're supposed to help them achieve enough of their potential that when they leave, it's like they're standing on the shoulders of giants instead of being like like newborn puppies who are outside for the first time. And if you've seen that, what what do they do? They cower. They just they just turn into little lumps, little pumpy puppy lumps on the ground because they're overwhelmed by all the sensory input because nothing prepared them for that when they were in their little kennel or wherever they were they were born and uh and nursed. That's not what we should be doing to our kids. And so a a father and a husband has a duty to expose to gradually expose his wife and children to greater measures of reality. And very very few do that. So let's talk through the long-term fruits of this. Why, you know, what what do these two roads look like? How do they diverge? So, in a typical family where you've got the father sugarcoating everything, just nursing everyone's feelings all the time, that's a very typical modern family, especially amongst those who profess to be Christians because the actual gospel has been replaced with this abomination of niceness. Well, all members of his family will be much more susceptible to falsehood as long as it's delivered in a nice package. You see, they haven't developed their discernment to actually evaluate the the content of a message for its impact, its cost, its benefit, its long-term effects. They just walk around as emotional gauges. This feels good. This feels bad. This feels good. This feels bad. In fact, some churches overtly teach that that is discernment. How something feels in the moment when when the scriptures are very plain that that's about as far from the truth as you can get. Good things feel bad and they usually feel bad, at least at first. The point is for us to learn to feel good around good things. It's not for us to decide what is good by how it makes us feel right now. So when you aren't training your family in how to accept and evaluate truth dispassionately, what you're doing is you're setting them up for failure. And you can guarantee that there will be plenty of people in the world who will tell them what they want to hear or tell them how they want to hear it. And they'll always use those mechanisms to manipulate them into what generates whatever they're after. And it's usually not good, right? Why is it usually not good? Because you can't go very far in persuading someone towards what is better subject to the constraint of them feeling good about it the whole time? Like what world class athlete felt good during all of their years of training to that point? Like looking at that path, at what point along the path was the next increment of improvement something that felt even better than what came before? Never. It was always harder. It was always harder and it was always better because those things go together typically. And it's not just true of athletes. You can apply this to basically any situation in life. Apply it to families itself. Are you telling me that marriage is easier than being single? Are you telling me that having kids is easier than not having kids? Of course not. The question is, is it worth it? That's a very different question. And if you orient your life towards the worth of things and you aim for what has the greatest meaning, you will constantly be doing things that feel bad. and you'll have to subject yourself to things that don't feel nice to hear and people who aren't nice to be around. But if you're actually studying your scriptures, this should come to no surprise. Flip open the New Testament to any old page, uh, the Gospels specifically, but you could you could lean into the letters as well, but especially in the Gospels, and read the page. Honestly, think about how you would feel in that situation. It doesn't matter what part we're talking about. You probably wouldn't feel very good. You'd probably feel terrible. What Jesus said and what he did if if looked at honestly, it's not this sheepish super nice guy. He was a very rough person. A very rough person. But so much of modern Christianity is just completely made up. It has no connection whatsoever to what's actually in the scriptures. And we've subjected ourselves to so many years of going to church and hearing this nonsense that it's really, really hard to take the scales from our eyes and just read the text as if we'd never seen it before. But to the extent that you're able to do that, you're going to see how rough Jesus really was. Now, that's the flip side of what I'm saying. There are always going to be smooth talkers who will tell you what you want to hear. Do you want your daughter to marry a smooth talker that tells her what she wants to hear? You might think, "Well, I want my daughter to be happy. I want a guy who's just going to lavish her with praise and money and all the things that she wants." Okay, how long is that going to last? How long does it ever last? Because the motive is never love. It's always to get gain. Love is a measurement of how much someone's willing to suffer for the benefit of another person. It's not a measurement of how fully they're willing to give that person what that person asks. That's not what love is. People who do that sort of thing are doing it, drum roll, for themselves, not the other person. it's always for themselves. So, you get a young lady who gets married to a guy who's just always praising her, always giving her all these wonderful things, always so nice. He's so nice. That's not going to last. And furthermore, even if it did, which it won't, sooner or later, that young lady is going to realize that she has zero intimacy with this guy. They are not connected at a deep level because they can't be. He's permanently locked in surface mode. Not just because he refuses to engage with her depths, but because he will not reveal his own to her because he's always nice. It's a real real problem. And so she's going to have serious self-worth issues as she should because she's going to know that yeah sure she's getting praised all the time but it's meaningless praise. It's empty. It has nothing to do with her. It's just because she's body 57389 in slot 6724. She's random human female in this marriage with random human male who's nice all the time. No one wants that. She might think she wants that initially, but 10 or 20 years from now, she's going to be a very unhappy woman for the rest of her life. Nice guys can't raise good kids. A great deal of the value that a woman encounters in life is through her children, including the quality of children that that they end up being. Quality adults her children end up becoming. Most of that will be determined by the quality of the man she marries. And that's just the way it is, whether you like it or not. If you marry a nice guy, you're not going to have good kids. So look around you if you'd like to test that theory. For some people, it's going to hit really close to home because your kids are the proof of what I'm saying. But it is a true true statement. So if you want to stop the cycle, you can stop it with your kids. So we talked about daughters. What about sons? When you raise a son to think that he has to blow smoke up a woman's butt in order for her to love him because that's what he saw with daddy and mommy that mommy was really never happy but she was really not happy unless dad was blowing smoke up her butt. They will replicate those patterns and they you will you will create little nice guys and it's like a virus takes over a cell makes a whole bunch of little baby viruses and lets them out into the environment. And that's a pretty good description of how most people run their families today. And those guys are going to go out and they're going to be taken advantage of. And girls are going to probably ignore them until they're older. And then they're looking for someone to pay their bills and they'll lock on to this nice guy and he's going to be absolutely miserable just like his dad was before him. So these things matter a lot. What about in life? Do you think someone who needs to hear things in a sugar-coated way and who evaluates truth based on its impact on their emotions is going to be a good citizen? Do you think they're going to vote for good things? Do you think they're going to make things better than they would be if they weren't around? Whether that's in society, at work, with their friends. Real friends tell each other what needs to be said, even if it costs the friendship. They don't sugarcoat things. Who do you go to when you want to hear things how they really are? You probably have a friend. You probably don't keep that friend around. You probably don't talk to them very often. Maybe it's like every two months, every six months. When you know that you're being deceived or you know that what the right thing is and you just don't have the courage to do it, who do you go to? That's the kind of friend that you should probably spend a lot more time with. The one who's going to set you straight. And this isn't a question of differential wisdom, per se. That's a different topic. That friend could be wrong very often. The point is, you know, exactly where you stand with them, and you know they're not going to sugarcoat things. They're not going to pull punches. They're going to say the things that need to be said. They're going to they live in a in a more full stream of truth than most people. And those are the kinds of people that you want to counsel with. Those are the kinds of friends that are worth having. Anyway, I don't want to make this too much longer, but I hope I I made some uncomfortable points that you'll now have to grapple with. It's good whether or not it's good to be blunt. It sure is good to be able to deal with bluntness.